Palestine has called on the international community to recognise the 1948 Nakba as a “crime of ethnic cleansing” committed by Israel against the Palestinian people, stressing that the Nakba “is still ongoing.”
The call came in a statement issued on Thursday by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry on the eve of the annual commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba on May 15.
The ministry urged the international community to classify the Nakba as a “crime of ethnic cleansing” and work towards “redressing its consequences and achieving the legitimate and inalienable rights” of the Palestinian people.
It said those rights include “self-determination and independence for the State of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, as well as the right of return and compensation for refugees through ending the prolonged Israeli colonial occupation.”
Palestinians use the term “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” to describe the displacement of 957,000 Palestinians out of 1.4 million who, according to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, lived in about 1,300 towns and villages in 1948, when the state of Israel was established on Palestinian land.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Israelis seized 774 Palestinian villages and cities in 1948, completely destroyed 531 of them and committed more than 70 massacres that killed over 15,000 Palestinians.
The bureau said the number of Palestinians worldwide reached about 15.49 million by the end of 2025, more than half of them living outside historic Palestine, including 6.82 million in Arab countries. The population of the State of Palestine stands at about 5.56 million, including 3.43 million in the occupied West Bank and 2.13 million in Gaza, according to the bureau.
The ministry reminded the international community of its responsibilities and “the importance of delivering justice to the Palestinian people and holding perpetrators accountable,” including recognising the Nakba as “a crime against humanity that cannot be denied, justified, or defended under any pretext.”
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‘A Zionist colonial project’
It stressed that “the Nakba is not merely a historical tragedy but an ongoing crime,” adding that it is not limited to “the brutal ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians from their land” nor to “massacres, killing, destruction, looting, violations, and displacement.”
The ministry said the Nakba, “as a Zionist colonial project, was engineered by colonial powers and embodied in the Balfour Declaration with the aim of uprooting the Palestinian people from their land, erasing their identity, and replacing them with settlers.”
The Balfour Declaration refers to a letter sent by then-British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour on November 2 1917, to Lord Lionel Rothschild, a leader of the Zionist movement at the time, in which the British government pledged support for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The ministry said the Nakba “is an ongoing crime that has never stopped,” pointing to Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza and the expansion of violence into the occupied West Bank.
The suffering caused by the Nakba included “the theft of land and rights and turning millions of Palestinians into refugees deprived of their right to return to their homeland,” it added.
The ministry stressed that the duty of the international community “is not limited to supporting the Palestinian cause but extends to protecting the Palestinian people and preventing the recurrence of such horrific crimes.”
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